1040 Fifth Avenue

1040 5th Avenue | also 1039 5th Avenue, 1 East 85th Street | Upper East Side | built 1930

Open on the map6 entries

The lot about 1940
About 1940. Via 1940s.nyc
The lot about 1985
About 1985. Via 80s.nyc

The city photographed every building for its tax records around 1940 and again in the 1980s. NYC Municipal Archives.

Written with AI from the source each entry cites, then fact-checked.

  1. 1908

    April 23

    James B. Clews buys the Fifth Avenue corner and plans a Horace Trumbauer mansion

    In April 1908 the banker James B. Clews, a nephew of Henry Clews, bought the northeast corner of Fifth Avenue and 85th Street, the site where 1040 Fifth Avenue now stands. By that October the old McBride brownstone there had been demolished and the Times reported plans for an Indiana limestone mansion by the Philadelphia architect Horace Trumbauer. Clews paid $100,000 for the land and the house was projected to cost about twice that. The entrance was to face Fifth Avenue rather than the side street.

    Source: Daytonian in Manhattan

  2. 1917

    January 14

    James and Meta Clews host a luncheon for the governor and his wife in their Fifth Avenue mansion

    The Clews mansion on the corner of Fifth Avenue and 85th Street, where 1040 Fifth Avenue stands today, was occupied around 1911 and became a setting for society entertaining. Governor Whitman and his wife were guests at a luncheon there on January 14, 1917. Meta Clews died in August 1919 at the family's Long Island estate, and James returned to the house with their nine-year-old daughter; the family moved away in 1929.

    Source: Daytonian in Manhattan

  3. 1930

    Rosario Candela's 17-story limestone apartment house rises on the site of earlier town houses

    The Landmarks Commission's Metropolitan Museum Historic District report describes 1040 Fifth Avenue as a seventeen-story limestone apartment house, designed by Rosario Candela, that went up in 1930 where several earlier town houses had stood. It says the low-scale residences at the corner of Fifth Avenue and 85th Street were demolished and replaced by a massive building that runs almost half the length of the block. After it was finished, the report adds, the small town houses still standing nearby were overwhelmed by its scale.

    Source: NYC Landmarks Preservation Commission

  4. 1950

    April

    Newspaper publisher Generoso Pope dies while living at 1040 Fifth Avenue

    Generoso Pope, owner of the Italian-language daily Il Progresso Italo-Americano and the sand-and-gravel firm Colonial Sand & Stone, died of a heart ailment in April 1950 at the age of 59. At the time he lived at 1040 Fifth Avenue, the building where Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis later made her home. He is interred in a private mausoleum at Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx.

    “At the time of his death, he lived at 1040 Fifth Avenue in Manhattan, the later home of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis.”

    Source: Wikipedia

  5. 1964

    Jacqueline Kennedy buys a 15th-floor penthouse at 1040 Fifth Avenue for $250,000

    In 1964, the year after her husband's assassination, Jacqueline Kennedy sold the Georgetown house she had bought for herself and her children and paid $250,000 for a 15th-floor penthouse at 1040 Fifth Avenue, hoping for more privacy. According to the building's Wikipedia entry, she kept the apartment for three decades, until she died in 1994.

    Source: Wikipedia

  6. 2000

    Candice Bergen moves into her husband's 16th-floor apartment at 1040 Fifth Avenue

    In 2000 the actress Candice Bergen moved into the 16th-floor apartment of her husband, Marshall Rose, at 1040 Fifth Avenue. The cooperative has only 27 apartments. David and Julia Koch also lived in the building, leaving in 2004 for 740 Park Avenue.

    Source: Wikipedia

Further reading

Nearby

All 93 buildings with stories in Upper East Side